the bottom of the blooper barrel

I hope enough time has passed for me to include this blooper. When my university decided to issue laptops to every student, it explained its rationale in the Cornerstone magazine. The article said that a laptop computer “is a tool that has become so commonplace here at the end of the Twentieth Century, with the prospect of becoming even more pervasive in the Twenty-first Century, that a person can no longer be called ‘educated’ without at least a rudimentary knowledge of how to use it. For Cornerstone, this means that we must provide to our students with the opportunity to learn how to use this tool with confidence.”

Obviously that last sentence, with its dueling prepositions, was not written on a laptop computer.

Here are my final ten bloopers, which are barely funny, if at all. Some of them struggle with metaphors, some belabor the obvious, and some stop just short of coherence.

10. One paper said that Bernard of Clairvaux used the illustration of marriage to “hammer home” the relationship between Christ and his church.

This made me wonder what this student’s home life is like.

9. “With the scientific rollercoaster humanity was about to take a seat on, the twentieth century ended up burying religion as a relic dinosaur.”

Rollercoaster and dinosaur in the same sentence? I pulled a muscle just reading it.

8. “It is only speculation to wonder where we would stand today if one preacher in Northampton had not made his imprint on history.”

Thank you for a fine definition of speculation.

7. “For the purpose of my discussion…I will limit the number of effects to those that are related to the issue.”

I sort of assumed that when I gave you the assignment. At least now I know we’re on the same page.

5. “This Calvinistic society awarded not gold or nightly orders but a university, a testament to their love for science.”

I receive nightly orders, such as “Set the alarm” and “Don’t hog the covers,” but I never associated them with Calvinism. Though it’s not as if I could exert my free will to resist my wife’s instructions, so I grant the point.

4. “Peter became a Christian Marxist by fusing the two dialects of Karl Barth and Karl Marx together.”

Swiss Germans may think their northern cousins talk funny, but I don’t know why this would matter to Christian socialism.

3. “The new law that Christ establishes is flushed out in his sermon on the mount.”

So Jesus used his sermon to expose and eliminate the very law he sought to establish?

2. “This God, reviling himself through history as a God of covenant relationships….”

I didn’t know that God was troubled by self-loathing.

1. “In Arminius’ view, the correct order of the gospel is that God gave His Sin, to whom we respond by repentance and faith.”

This doesn’t seem to fairly represent the Arminian view. Not even Charles Finney would go this far. Would he?